Album Review: Tune-Yards - Nikki Nack

The strength of Merrill Garbus has always been the pure exhilaration for both the performer and her audience when she lets fly with her voice, a rich sonorous expulsion at once primal, swelling and vibrant. Over the course of the half-decade she's inhabited her Tune-Yards persona she's provided us with a febrile menagerie of vocal loops that soars towards the sun, entwining African vocal tradition, R&B machinations, operatic mores and a devilish imagination to continually defy explanation.

Despite her inventiveness, or most likely because of it, Garbus' appeal tends to be divisive. New record Nikki Nack isn't likely to drag a swathe of detractors; there's so much going on here that those adventurous enough to enter her world will find infinite wonders. Focusing on world politics, social injustices and the perennial plight of the female performer in a male-oriented world, Tune-Yards' third long-player is a practiced study in popular music deconstruction, all done with insidious hooks and feverish glee. Further shining the lo-fi oddities of Bird-Brains while delving deeper into the intricate production sleights-of-hand of 2011's Whokill, Garbus has carved out a bevy of socially-conscious hits – the acerbic yet euphoric Real Thing celebrating her luck as an artist while ironically noting her unlikely rise alongside other pop starlets; Water Fountain, using handclaps, drums and woo-ha's to evoke African-American sing-song while simultaneously forcing the spotlight on social atrocities.

Her gleaming inventiveness doesn't always work – the 90-second “child's story” Why Do We Dine On The Tots is a curiosity of diminishing returns – but Nikki Nack establishes Garbus as a cunning, effervescent queen of pop.